University is community. Psychology for teaching: distance learning, interaction and reflexivity

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the impossibility of contact and face to face interaction has highlighted the importance of spaces for sharing and relationship in distance teaching offering a cross-section of emotions, questions and choices. Our contribution will present a distance learning course organized during the pandemic in the vein of community psychology. During the semester of teaching exclusively online made in the lockdown, we prepared an online course offering continuous monitoring and giving to the students an opportunity of active participation and scientific engagement. It involved 437 students of the degree course in Psychological Sciences and Techniques (teaching community psychology).

Picture retrieved from SHARE Libri

It was an opportunity of connectedness that scaffolded the isolated students. Exercises, video-web research and continuously interaction with the teacher maintain a shared connection. The use of photo, video and storytelling as didactic tools allowed an opportunity of reflectivity. In fact, the course has been a container of thoughts and emotions, an instrument of personal growth as well as cognitive. The attention to the active interaction of student lecturer, the creation of a strong teaching community and a methodology based on learning by doing, objectives of community psychology, have been experimented in distance teaching.

The experience of the course makes us aware that online support can enrich the learning path and shows us how its excellence develops only when the conditions of interaction and exchange between learners and teachers and students are central to the organization of objectives and educational paths. Online support has the potential to make it possible, or better to facilitate a teaching mode in which the student becomes a participant actor. The final book gave back the restitution of the whole experience.

Story shared by Caterina Arcidiacono, Italy.

More info here or contact at caterina.arcidiacono@unina.it

Covid nurses wear lapel pins with cartoon avatar

Patients were not able to recognize health professional wearing mask, and this had implications on caring, empathy, reducing the caring (not the curing) capacity of the health professionals. The provincial president of nurses report the problem during a newspaper interview, and an illustrator offered her ideas to solve the issue.

Now most nurses in different wards of the most important hospitals in Bologna wear the lapel pins and this help nurses doing their job.

Picture retrieved from La Repubblica

This was recognized as a good initiative by the ministry of health, nurses would like to formalize it as a good practice, providing a simple, funny way to handle a problem that may apply also in other contexts (i.e, schools, kindergartens etc.).

Story shared by Cinzia Albanesi, Italy.

More info here or contact cinzia.albanesi@gmail.com